


with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah

by laserbeamer (disequilibrium)



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Artists, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-26
Updated: 2012-10-26
Packaged: 2017-11-17 02:17:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disequilibrium/pseuds/laserbeamer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Niall's lost himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah

**Author's Note:**

> More an exploratory piece than anything, based loosely on Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah, inspired by Don McLean's Starry, Starry Night and the Van Gogh episode of Doctor Who. Originally posted on tumblr, under nialljustgotwet. Also posted on livejournal under laserbeamer. I do not consent to having my work posted on any other platform, or under any of the platforms listed under any other name besides those specified. This work is not for profit.

Niall can’t remember what the world looked like when it was beautiful, but now he sees it in shades of grey-tainted blue and sleepless nights and starless skies. Nothing has moved him in a long time – even the music turns its heavy head away; stark, tuneless, empty. After all, it’s only fingers on guitar strings and a voice that’s cracked ‘round the edges and nothing more. He lost the magic of hope and all the things that made him want this, and now he only does it because he doesn’t know how to do anything else, and he certainly doesn’t compose any more because the inspiration's run dry and nobody cares to hear his heart, anyway.

He’s come to believe that everyone else is just as lost and broken as he is. He can see that their eyes have dulled and their smiles are fleeting, he can hear the tinny echoes of their short-lived laughter and their stories that fall on deaf ears. None of them listen, none of them really listen, so why bother making a sound?

Which is why, when he looks through the dim and dreary light of the bar and sees eyes full of everything he’s lost, he stops playing altogether.

Half of Niall wants to capture whatever it is that keeps that light going, and half of him wants to tear it down until it’s gone and the darkness soaks over the only soul that’s still alive in this long-dead place.

-

Sometimes he stands at the window and stares up at the sky, and his eyes find the silver sliver of the moon hanging just beyond the city lights. He wonders how this view ever touched him enough to inspire him. And then he wonders how he ever got so numb that it doesn’t any more. His fingers don’t itch to play and his feet don’t tap to the beat inside his head, because there is none, and he realizes that where the music used to be is just silence.

Sometimes he sits down with his guitar and tries to pluck out chords that mean something, but they all sound the same.

-

Those eyes haunt him so that he twists and turns at night, tries to find a place for them in his mind but they don’t fit anywhere, don’t fit into the tidy clutter of half-finished thoughts and forgotten hopes. They stare at him from the corners of the darkness, glowing bright and alive, and he finds himself reaching toward them and watching for them and they’ve somehow injected themselves into his veins; they become a compulsion, they take him over, and it baffles him because he has never been so captivated by anything, has never been able to not push anything away, to not let anything go.

-

When he sees the boy on the roof with the brush in his hand and the easel in front of him, painting the sky, he almost laughs, but then he finds that where the city-washed navy should be are swirls of blue and spots of gold and something wells up inside of Niall, something like sadness and something like regret, because therein lies the world he has lost… and if he wasn’t ten stories up above the cold, hard pavement, he would be inclined to leap right out his window and go running off down the street and away, chasing after the ghost of the dream he sees in the acrylic-soaked canvas.

-

His curls are soft and his eyes are wide and they sparkle and his lips are full and deep and his skin reminds Niall of the moon the way it should be, and he slides himself onto Niall’s lap with the thrum of the top 40 hits and lets Niall shove his tongue down his throat and clutches at his hair. He lets himself be taken home without hesitation because he’s young and wild and he somehow tasted whatever it is that Niall hid so deep inside himself. But when they get back to Niall’s flat, he’s too eager and not brooding and sultry like artists are supposed to be, and he doesn’t feel as breakable as Niall thought he was and Niall begins to wonder if maybe it was a different boy on that roof top who worked as though a fever burned within him, who sat in the back of the smoky bar and watched him play, that maybe he doesn’t have that fever; maybe Niall imagined it. He starts to pull away – and that’s when the boy clings desperately to him, shoves him up against the wall and kisses him hard and open-mouthed like that will make him stay, yanks at his hair and shoves his knee between Niall’s legs, squeezes moans of pleasure from him like paint from the tube and pulls his shirt over his head and covers the canvas of his chest in a mottled collage of lips and teeth, slips his fingers along the sharp bones of Niall’s hips, takes him in his mouth and leaves crescent-shaped indents where his nails dig into Niall’s thighs like the little moons Niall was wishing he could chase after.

Harry makes love to him like something burning, a fire so close Niall chokes on its heat, a fire he pulls closer until it catches him, too.

-

Harry falls in love the way Niall doesn’t: head over heels, completely and irrevocably, hitting every branch on the way down. By the battered curve of his spine and the hesitant depth of his gaze Niall can see it happen a hundred times, can see those eyes spark to life, glow brilliantly, see their passion burn out the night. He can also see them break – a hundred times they’ve broken and they’ll break a hundred times more, so long as Harry continues to wear his heart so entirely on his sleeve. There’s some sick, twisted desire that curls within Niall, that makes him want to show Harry that love is only a silly game, that love isn’t worth it at all, that love is not beautiful: not even slightly.

He doesn’t know when he got so bitter. He doesn’t know why he wants the world to crumble beneath his feet. He only knows he doesn’t want to be alone any more; he wants somebody who will understand.

-

When he sits down with his guitar the music comes, slow and excruciating, but it comes and it’s there and he hunches over the sound as the flickering neon lights pool across the floor, splashes of indifferent colour in the corners of his vision. He holds this moment close, fingers caressing the strings, playing for those eyes and nothing more.

-

Where Niall is thoughtful and critical, Harry is simply fluid, directed by whims and a faltering instinct for survival. Niall finds that Harry needs to be loved, craves to be loved, needs to have somebody warm to hold him through the night or at least kiss him or at least touch him – Harry will do anything for even just a touch, and it makes Niall wonder what has made him this way, what memories make up the pieces of his uneven jigsaw – and it also makes Niall want to be different from the rest, makes him want to wrap his arms around Harry and kiss the top of his head and run his hands over his skin and ask for nothing in return.

-

“Dare ya to catch me!” Harry screams as he goes bounding out into the ocean, sand swirling in the hollows left by his feet. The louder the tumble of laughter from his lips, the sadder he seems, and it’s disheartening the way such joy erupts from such misery – the way hope clings parasitically to hopelessness. Niall watches him go, a child trapped in the suffocating confines of adulthood, running toward an unreachable horizon, and he wonders what Harry’s looking for. And if he’ll ever find it; if he’ll ever be able to fill the lost places in his soul, the little pieces of himself that long for something always out of reach.

He’s up to his waist, now, salt water swirling grey around him, idly threading his fingers through ropes of seaweed. He seems so small and alone in the big, wide world, like everybody’s left him and he doesn’t know what to do.

Before he can turn around to find that only terrifying emptiness has followed, Niall leaps in his wake and pushes him under and kisses him the way the river kisses the sea.

-

Though the feeling is back in his fingers and the music comes fast and steady, the darkness still remains, shrouded over him, and Harry doesn’t try to reach through it because he’s just as much under it as Niall is, and Niall now knows that it isn’t faith or happiness or belief that make Harry’s eyes glow like they do, but the fever he sees when Harry paints, when he takes something mediocre and turns it into something beautiful – heartbreakingly, disturbingly beautiful, something that moves you but you don’t know why – it’s the fever that makes Harry’s hands shake when they aren’t holding a brush and palette, that makes him shiver with pain when he realizes that these are all only paintings and they will never be true, that everything as he sees it will be locked forever inside his own head.

He paints the way he falls in love, furious and astonishing, throwing all of himself into a simple lie, expecting it to be real.

As soon as Niall discovers this he discovers that they have suctioned onto each other, two lonely and fraying hearts tumbling down into the dark, falling faster than ever before.

-

Niall stares callously into Harry’s soul as Harry’s thumb traces the curve of his jaw, as Harry presses his lips to Niall’s and tries to drink him in. And even when Niall’s eyes fall closed, Harry is not safe, because Niall will always know about the little flecks of paint beneath his fingernails and the raw fury that courses through his veins. When he holds him close and even when Harry sleeps he can feel the heat there, can feel it writhing to get out, and though it frightens him he almost wants to release it just so he can see what it does to the world.

-

The power of this feeling is too much, it sends him over the edge. There is the torment of the all-too-visible scars on Harry’s heart, the hesitant fingertips so used to beauty slipping from their grasp, the way every kiss is the last kiss, because in spite of his naivety Harry has always known “forever” to be a lie; and when the word spills from Niall’s lips like red wine across white carpet he is quick to blot the mess dry, to dismiss it as a mistake, and doesn’t realize that the stain will never come out.

Niall begins to wonder if Harry really does love him or if he just loves the idea of being loved or, even, the idea of loving someone just enough to get his heart broken.

-

When Niall can’t save Harry he gives him what he wants and snaps him in half and slams the door in his face, sinking into the desperate anger and hurt of his own, fruitless sacrifice.

He expects the silence of before, but there is none because his head is full of the sound of canvases ripping and paint cans clattering over and the dry sobs of a tangled mess of limbs in a corner. And it tears him up from the inside out and he wonders, how many times can you break ‘til you shatter? and then he’s running, running the way he should have run after the dream of the moon, but this is real, it’s all real, and that’s the shout of every fibre of his being when he stumbles through the ruins and finds Harry – paint smudged across flush cheeks, dribbled between wrists and elbows, tangled through chestnut curls – with his toes curled over the frozen rail of the balcony in the dead of winter, clinging to one of the frail support beams and leaning precariously out over the fatal emptiness like he's planning throwing himself into the abyss. The snow tumbles through the black night, blanketing the world in an eerie calm that is only broken by a muted burst of furious protest when Niall grabs him and yanks him down, drags him inside where he spits and screams and writhes and shrieks that he can’t be happy, can’t be happy, I have to hurt. And Niall holds his cold, shivering, vehement frame until sharp sobs begin to wrack his body and he curls close and mumbles sorry, sorry, sorry as the freezing air from the still-open door swirls over them.

But Niall hushes him because he understands, understands how hard it is to claw your way out of pain when that’s all you’ve ever felt.

-

By the secret thrill of anguish illuminating Harry’s darkened eyes, Niall can tell he half-wishes he’d managed to make the jump, and he lays there in the darkness of tangled quilts and winter hush and asks, “why?” But Harry only smiles sadly and turns away so Niall can’t see through him any more, buries his face in the pillow until his breaths grow steady and even. Niall reaches out to tangle his fingers through Harry’s because, even though Harry refuses to let hope propagate within him, Niall can still feel a little bit of it coil around his own heart; a tiny, dusty flower fighting to bloom in the desolate ruins of despair.

-

The next morning brings a silence too heavy to break, and in desperation Niall slams his cold cup of coffee down and demands:

“Look at me!”

When Harry refuses to meet his gaze, Niall runs out of patience and shoves him with a terrified fury he didn’t know he had – the terror of losing him to nothing; the terror of losing, all storming in his eyes as he stares at the broken lines of Harry’s face, the gaunt pull of his cheeks. He shakes with every breath, fists clenched, teeth gritted, frustration and pain welling like acid at the back of his throat. At length, Harry opts to look up with a challenge in his eyes, full lips closing prettily around low words:

“Do it. I know you want to.”

Niall bites his lip so hard he can taste the metallic sting of blood across the tip of his tongue, but it isn’t enough to keep his fury contained and he loses control, arm swinging around with the weight of a thousand problems he could never fix.

When he hits Harry, he wants it to bruise. They’re both so messed up and he wants it to show in the smudge of violet-spattered bronze edging Harry’s sea green eyes, soaking across his ivory skin – the faded rosé of impact on his cheek, the trust soaking like midnight blue into the silence of ember-red breaths and charcoal-soaked gazes, the golden terror of pain never quite outweighing the silver terror of being alone. Harry flinches back like he wasn’t expecting Niall to do it, and that infuriates Niall even more because he would do anything Harry asked him to. But when he stumbles back and cradles his fist to his chest, when he hears the all-too-human moan of hurt slip past the hands covering Harry’s injured face, his anger dissipates and he finds himself dissolving over Harry’s fragile frame, absorbing the tears that have come again, the subtle strength that has finally waned.

Like one of your paintings, he’ll whisper later, fingertips trailing over the mark on Harry’s skin, Harry wincing with a pain you can see.

-

“I hate you,” Harry chokes out, and he means it, too, and Niall realizes that he’s mad – mad – to stay, but he does. And that’s when Harry looks at him, eyes glassed with a sadness that makes Niall’s toes curl and his heart pound and his breath hitch in his throat, and he reaches forward to push Harry’s curls off his face because they’re so intoxicatingly dark against his pale skin, but they keep falling forward when he pulls his hands away, so he combs his fingers through them and holds them in place and leans forward to kiss Harry’s trembling lips, and before he closes his own eyes he can see Harry’s screaming back at him: I love you.

-

The only bruises Harry ever leaves are the watercolour stains along the base of Niall’s neck and the ones on his wrists where he begs him to stay – and that’s the only time Niall ever says he’s sorry, and the only time he ever collects anything in his arms, and the only time he tries to fix it.

-

The water is a perfect mirror of the sky, and when they jump into the water, they are jumping into the sky, and the stars settle over their skin and they are swimming in the still, black universe. Under the water, Niall’s hands find Harry and he pulls him close, reaching out to capture the wonder of stardust-spattered skin and the eyes he could never forget. And Harry’s smile bursts at the seams because the world is too beautiful, too good for them, too full of incredible impossibility – overflowing with it. He is consumed by his own, sad joy, snaking his arms around Niall’s torso, pressing his ear to his chest, breathing in time to the beat of his heart.

The universe pools over their shoulders, clutching at their necks, dragging them deeper. Harry turns to it, breath sending soft ripples over its surface. Niall thinks back to the very first painting, stars blossoming gold across the canvas, filling the sky, taking over the empty spaces of infinity, and thinks that Harry must be blinded when he looks at the night.

“Will we ever be ordinary, d’you think?” the words slip over his tongue as their legs tangle beneath the water, feet scrambling lightly over slimy, round stones.

“I don’t want to live long enough to become ordinary,” Harry whispers into Niall’s neck, his jaw, his mouth, the water seeping over their chins, cheeks, ears, and Niall knows that this is happiness, exploding out like the universe, and he knows that when he is not with Harry he is not alive, and he knows that the water will soak away all the beauty until they are the only incredible impossibility left –

He steals Harry’s breath the way Harry stole his music and his heart and his long, lonely nights, locking it away as they fall into the waiting hands of the forever Harry can finally believe.

-

Niall wants to shout triumphantly from the rooftops that he can feel again, he can feel again, feel Harry’s thumbprints on his wrists and his laughter thrum through his chest, feel the wind on his skin and the rain in his hair. He sits with his feet hooked around the lower rung of the bar stool and the guitar perched in his lap and he plays, really plays, plays past their worn and vacant gazes to the boy who started it all and they’re both so alive, and that’s when Niall realizes that the point of life is not to be happy but to be everything, to be consumed with feeling, to sit at the bottom of the raging river and have it all wash around you in muffled chaos, watching as your last breath bubbles desperately toward a surface you will never break through.

That’s when Niall realizes he loves Harry back and somehow this isn’t half as devastating as it should have been.

-

Harry adds sunshine yellow to the dark mess before him, but it swirls green like his eyes and then he laughs and Niall laughs, too. And he forgot how good it felt, and he laughs and laughs until it hurts too much to laugh any more. And he wonders why he doesn’t stop other things when they start to hurt too much, too, but he looks at Harry and, as much as Harry hurts, he can’t stop him.

-

They are a barefoot thunder across witching-hour pavement, side by side between yesterday and tomorrow, chasing the moon that dances just beyond the city lights.


End file.
